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Thursday, January 26, 2006

Double Standards

Updated

Eytan Kobre writes for a blog which urged JIB voters to support Cross Current's ambition to conquer the world and become the universe's premiere Torah blog, yet he has the unbounded nerve to suggest that I tried too hard to win a JIB? Me? I never stooped low enough to beg for votes by claiming it was necessary for the sake of spreading Torah, did I? I mean ye gods. That's almost as disgusting as Cheney's notorious "Vote GOP or Chicago gets nuked"

What I did was this: I wrote a post or two per round on the subject, plus I put up a blogad on my own site. That's about par for the course for JIB contestant, which is all perfectly fine: Self promotion is good. The blogosphere thrives on self-promotion. The JIBs could not exist without self promotion. But pious-sounding objections to the practice of self-promotion, like Eytan's, are deceitful and also counter productive.

And while we're on the subject of double standards, let's turn to GH's post on the subject of JIBs. The post is hysterical, sure, like much of what GH publishes, but also a bit mean especially in the way that he casually dismisses his competitors. If I tried such a thing all the self-rightuous DovBear bashers would line up to pound me into the ground on my comment section. Many of them would also write critical posts on the subject of "Mean Old DovBear and His Lack of Respect for the Blogging Rules that Exist in My Head and Nowhere Else."

In fact, this actually happened last year. I cruely dismissed one of my competitors as "neither funny nor Jewish" (the admitadly poor joke being that my competitor quite obviously was both) and one of the very great men of the blogosphere (with whom I've since reconciled, thank god) wrote a long post about me that would easily win the JIB for "Most Viscious Post of the Year" if such a category existed.

Perhaps, the problem is that people think I take blogging too seriously so let me restate one of the founding principles of this blog: DovBear is 98 percent shtick and 2 percent politics. [A year later it's probably more like 90 percent shtick, 5 percent religion, and 5 percent politics.] Ok? We're just having fun here.

If it relates to Jews, Judaism, holidays, Midrash,Torah, halacha or anything similar, I probably have a post on it. And if I have a post on it, I probably have a good comment thread with great reader-provided information, too.

Try a search and see for yourself. If you can't find what you're looking for ask me.

Quotes

רֹאשׁ דְּבָרְךָ אֱמֶת קוֹרֵא מֵרֹאשׁ דּוֹר וָדוֹר עַם דּוֹרֶשְׁךָ דְּרֹשׁ
Your chief word is "truth"; You've called it out since the beginning. In each generation people interpret You [for themselves] and find [their own] meaning.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd. -Flannery O'Connor

“When in the afterglow of religious insight I can see a way that is good for all humans as it is for me—I will know it is His way.” - R. Abraham Joshua Heschel

I don't accept at all the quite popular argument that the press is responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. The monarchy's responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. To blame the press is the old thing of blaming the messenger for the message. -Anthony Holden

Said behind my back

"...he's trying to show that there are other facets to Orthodox Judaism. That we don't all think one way and vote one way. And he's occasionally entertaining when he's not being mean-spirited" [PsychoToddler]"

"He's witty. He's funny. He appreciates the ridiculous in life, and has no qualms about telling you when he thinks that you're being a moron" [Cara]

" I'm pretty sure [DovBear] is a really great guy who just wants to be able to ask questions and talk about things without the fear of someone claiming he's off the derech or on his way there." [Chaviva]